• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 984 0

my years on the trail of trash, visiting factories and dumps and learning about how things are made, used, and thrown away around the world. I certainly didn’t sit down to figure out how to explain the flaws in capitalism. It was trash, not economics, that was originally on my mind. So, at first it took me by surprise that some commentators called the film “an ecological critique of capitalism” or “anti-capitalist.” Was it? Really? That inspired me to go back and dust off my old books on economics to revisit the core characteristics of capitalism. And I realized those commentators were on to something. It turns out that a hard look at how we make and use and throw away Stuff reveals some pretty deep problems caused by core functions of a specific economic system called capitalism. There’s no way around it: capitalism, as it currently functions, is just not sustainable.

As lawyer and former presidential advisor Gus Speth wrote in his book The Bridge at the End of the World, “Inherent in the dynamics of capitalism is a powerful drive to earn profits, invest them, innovate, and thus grow the economy, typically at exponential rates... My conclusion, after much searching and considerable reluctance, is that most environmental deterioration is a result of systemic failures of the capitalism that we have today, and that long-term solutions must seek transformative change in the key features of this contemporary capitalism.”18

Yet, in the United States, we’re still hesitant to broach this unmentionable subject, fearful of being labeled unpatriotic, unrealistic, or insane. Elsewhere in the world, there’s a widespread recognition that some aspects of capitalism aren’t working well for the majority of the world’s people or for the planet; people talk about it openly. Michael Cohen, Lecturer in American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, says that’s because in other countries capitalism is seen as one option among many, whereas in the United States it’s considered an inevitability.19

Can we put capitalism on the table and talk about it with the same intellectual rigor that we welcome for other topics? Can we examine the failures of capitalism without falling into generations-old stereotypes and without being accused of being un-American? Refusing to talk about it doesn’t make the problems disappear. I believe the best way to honor our country is to point out when it’s going astray, instead of sit here silently as many economic, environmental, and social indices worsen. Now would be a good time to start looking at what we could do differently, and what we could do better.

Take the Red Pill

The belief that infinite economic growth is the best strategy for making a better world has become like a secular religion in which all our politicians, economists, and media participate; it is seldom debated, since everyone is supposed to just accept it as true. People who challenge capitalism or growth are considered wackos, or as a recent article in U.S. News & World Report put it, “The growing anti-economic-growth movement [is] made up of extreme environmentalists, hand-wringing technophobes, and turn-back-the-clock globalization bashers...”20 Even while taking over the reigns of a country steeped in social, environmental, and economic problems, during a troubled time ripe for the adoption of alternative strategies, President Obama and his team promised over and over that economic growth would return. The U.S. Treasury’s $800 billion rescue package to stabilize financial markets in late 2008 was to protect this sacred idea of economic growth, and by 2009, Obama, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, economic czar Larry Summers, and Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke had committed an estimated $13 trillion of public funds to bailing out Wall Street and kick-starting economic growth again.

What gives? Why are so few people willing to challenge, or even critically discuss, an economic model that so clearly isn’t serving the planet and the majority of its people? I think one reason is that the economic model is nearly invisible